Daniela Perrotti is Professor of Landscape at the University of Louvain, Belgium. Her research is an inquiry into the potential of urban metabolism theory and models to advance evidence-based understanding of the relations that urban communities establish with natural resources. Her work positions itself distinctively in the urban metabolism scientific landscape by operating along two novel lines of research. The first provides a critical revision of the ‘urban metabolism’ paradigm through more robust interdisciplinary methods that can favour an ‘agentic understanding’ of metabolic processes and deeper descriptions of society-nature relations in cities. The second line operationalises the first by concentrating on the establishment of more comprehensive metabolic knowledge frameworks to analyse the links between the biophysical foundations of socioeconomic development, natural capital, and human wellbeing via ‘ecosystem service’ and ‘green infrastructure’ perspectives.